


Sheets

by FloreatCastellum



Series: Marauder Moments [16]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:13:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24127195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FloreatCastellum/pseuds/FloreatCastellum
Summary: Frank and Alice go to help an old friend with a difficult task.
Relationships: Alice Longbottom/Frank Longbottom
Series: Marauder Moments [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1474679
Comments: 32
Kudos: 93





	Sheets

It was a beautiful day. The air was fiercely cold, it numbed the skin at once, but it was still, and quiet. The sky above was a vast, unending blue, and despite the absence of its warmth, the sun rested as a bright gold as they stood on the doorstep.

His wife let out a shuddering breath. The cloud of it coiled against the wooden door. The glossy paint was chipped and the wood beneath was cracked around the lock.

‘You don’t have to,’ he said quietly.

‘I do,’ she said, not with resignation but with that fierce determination that always seemed to surprise everyone except him. ‘It could have been us, Frank. And you know they’d have done this for us.’

He nodded. They would have done. Unquestioningly. He briefly glanced back over his shoulder at the lawn, scorched and scattered with rubble. He swallowed, and knocked gently.

He was prepared, but it was still a shock to see Remus Lupin open it. If he was surprised to see them, his pallid, exhausted face did not show it. He merely blinked at them, red-tinged eyes surrounded by dark shadows. He seemed to be going grey, though Frank had thought of that group as mere children.

‘Remus,’ said Alice in a gentle whisper. ‘We heard you were here. We didn’t want you to do this alone.’

He stared at them, and seemed to swallow. ‘I’m quite all right,’ he said hoarsely. ‘You should… go and celebrate with everyone-’

‘You’re not,’ she said. ‘And that’s OK.’

‘Let us help,’ said Frank.

Lupin seemed to sway slightly, but he nodded and stood aside, and they stepped over the threshold. The light fell through the windows with unsettling beauty, resting on the dark floorboards of the hallway, glinting off the wheels of the pram pushed up against the wall, a little pile of wellington boots beneath it. The little flag markers they had used for evidence had been removed, by who Frank wasn’t sure, but his eyes searched for where they had been. When he glanced at Alice, she was staring at where they had found him, crumpled on the floor, blank eyed and still.

‘I’ve…’ Lupin cleared his throat, though as he continued his voice still sounded close to breaking. ‘I’ve done the dining room and the kitchen… I don’t think that… upstairs is safe…’

‘Yes, we saw,’ said Alice soothingly, as he took a steadying breath. ‘We won’t go up there.’

‘So it’s just the living room, really,’ he continued quickly, looking somewhere in the middle distance. ‘Just charming sheets over everything to protect the furniture from… from dust and-’

But the break in his voice was too much, and Alice stepped forward and embraced him. Frank shifted a little uncomfortably, aware of Lupin’s condition, and trying to remind himself that it was not full moon for another few days. It was so like Alice not to think of these things, but he thought it a good thing in this instance; Lupin seemed to slump slightly against her, his hands trembling against her back.

‘We’re so sorry,’ he heard Alice say. ‘For everything. For James and Lily. For Peter.’

Lupin seemed to let out a low, groaning sort of howl, and Alice continued to hush him softly. ‘We’re here for you, the whole Order is,’ she told him.

Frank could bear to watch it no longer. Seeing another’s pain like this had always been too much for him, too agonising. He was a practical sort of man, who liked to be able to do things to help, and there was nothing to be done to help people through such torture as grief. Except for someone as lovely as Alice. She always managed to find a way.

‘I’ll continue,’ he said quietly, and he slipped through to the living room.

When he had been here days before, as part of work, as part of the investigation, the little side table by the door had been knocked over. They had had to step carefully over it, carefully placing a little flag marker atop. It had now been picked up and put back into place, the little golden dish that was used to chuck keys and loose change into gleaming on top, as though nothing had happened.

‘Linteum,’ he muttered quietly, and from his wand blossomed a lily-white sheet, which he carefully maneuvered to rest over the table like a shroud.

He continued around the living room, and became aware, from the quiet mutterings and shuffling feet, of Lupin and Alice entering and continuing with him.

He reached the mantlepiece, and the welsh dressers on either side. Many of the photo frames he remembered were empty; he turned to ask Lupin where they were, but the question died in his throat. Lupin was sat at the piano, staring down at the ivory keys, all of them lying still and quiet and cold in a row.

Frank slowly approached, and cautiously placed a hand on his shoulder. Lupin barely reacted, and so Frank gently closed the lid over the keys. Lupin reached up, and closed the book of sheet music resting against the stand.

‘Well done,’ said Frank, though he didn’t know why he said it.

Lupin stood, and enchanted a sheet over the piano. He was brisker now, with more purpose and hurry, as though there were a sense of urgency. Alice looked up from carefully arranging a sheet over the wingback armchair to watch him throw sheets over the coffee table, the wireless, the grandfather clock.

‘Remus, it’s all right,’ said Alice quietly.

‘It’s not,’ he said briskly.

‘No, it’s not.’

There was a sudden mewling. Frank jumped slightly, and looked down at the source of the high-pitched noise. A cat was in a wicker basket with a grated door. He could see the yellow eyes staring up at them.

‘Lily’s cat,’ said Remus. He still sounded as though he were forcing every word out. ‘I don’t know what to do with it.’

‘You don’t want it?’ Alice asked.

‘Can’t,’ he replied gruffly. ‘I - I can’t.’

‘We’ll take it,’ said Frank, even though he didn’t much like cats.

‘Yes,’ said Alice brightly. ‘A lovely addition to the family.’

‘Where’s your little boy?’ asked Remus suddenly.

A lifetime of instincts and scary stories and embedded beliefs made Frank tense about the werewolf enquiring about their son, but he pushed it down to calmly reply, ‘with my mother. Have you news on Harry?’

Lupin closed his eyes, swallowed again, and slowly shook his head. ‘Lily’s sister, I presume,’ he said.

‘I didn’t know she’s got a sister.’

Perhaps it was Alice’s accidental phrasing, of present over past, but Lupin turned on his heel sharply and strode quickly from the room. They winced as they glanced at one another, and uneasily followed him to find him in the hall, pulling back the pram to open the cupboard under the stairs just enough to clumsily and desperately reach his arm in to grasp at the coats inside.

Finally, after some breathy cursing, he pulled back with a little cardboard box, closed the door, and pushed the pram back to where it was. His trembling fingers fumbled with it, but from the box he pulled out a cigarette, placing it immediately in his mouth.

‘Want one?’ he muttered, almost aggressively.

‘No thank you.’

‘We don’t smoke.’

He seemed to almost laugh. ‘Yeah, neither do I.’ He shoved the box in his pocket, and lit the cigarette with his wand. ‘I’ll be in the back garden,’ he said brusquely.

He strode off through the door that led to the kitchen, and even after he had vanished Frank stared after him, only turning back to his wife when he heard her sniff.

Alice was wiping the heel of her hand beneath her eyes, breathing deeply and slowly. ‘It’s just so awful,’ she said.

‘I know. At least the baby survived.’

‘Do you think Neville would have? If it had been us?’ she asked.

He sighed, and shrugged, shaking his head. ‘Who knows? How does that even happen? It’s incredible.’

Despite her attempts at calming down, a fresh sob escaped her. ‘God, I’m awful for feeling relieved-’

‘No,’ he said, quickly, reaching for her at once. ‘No, of course you’re not-’

‘I am, I am, it could have so easily been us, it could have been our little boy, Frank-’

‘I know, and it wasn’t, and the war’s over now - it’s all right to have mixed feelings about that, it’s all right to find happiness-’

‘It’s not,’ she insisted. ‘Not when the kids are dead-’

They weren’t kids, not really. James, Lily and Peter. Frank and Alice had only been a few years older than them after all, and particularly in the last year or so had made a habit of going round to the Potters for dinner. Yet even so, they had all seemed so very young, and so was Lupin. Too young to be taking responsibility for closing up a house like this, laying it to rest along with his friends.

Frank hugged his wife, and rocked her slightly as she cried. Their little boy was all right. He was safely with Gran and Grandpa, probably munching away on a banana right now, which was the latest favourite, and he would be all right from now on. What parents wouldn’t feel relief after that?

He told her this, and she sobbed harder, but she was nodding. He wondered if it was disrespectful to talk about this, standing almost exactly where James Potter had fell.

‘The Potters were so brave,’ he said, to make it better.

‘They really were,’ she agreed quickly. ‘They were wonderful. It’s not fair.’

‘It’s not. Not at all. Not for them, not for that little boy, not for Lupin.’

She sniffed again, and broke apart from him. ‘I’ll check there’s nothing else that needs covering,’ she said. ‘Would you go and check on him?’

He nodded, and gave her a parting kiss on her forehead, before turning to follow Lupin.

Out in the garden, he found Lupin sitting on a low wall at the end of the patio, swinging his legs over what appeared to be a tall drop into the flower beds below.

Frank went and stood beside him, and for a while neither said anything. They simply looked out at the landscape, the deep valley, brilliant in the blazing, cold sunlight. At the end of the garden, there was a cedar tree, and Frank thought he could spot mistletoe growing around it, though it seemed to be near enough dead.

He needs to cut back some of the branches if he wants to keep that, Frank thought.

‘The funeral’s at two,’ Lupin said suddenly. ‘Day after tomorrow.’

Frank nodded. ‘Thank you. We’ll be there, of course.’

‘I’ve got to write a eulogy,’ said Lupin dully. ‘Everything’s so tied up with Black, though.’

‘It’s shocking,’ said Frank, the hush in his voice underpinning his genuine horror at what had transpired. ‘I never would have believed it.’

‘Nor I.’

He finished his cigarette. Stubbed it out on the wall beside him. Vanished it.

‘You guys take the cat,’ he said. ‘I’m going to stay here for a while.’

Frank squeezed his shoulder once more. ‘You know where we are if you need us,’ he said.

He returned to the house, and he and his wife gathered up the basket with the yowling cat, and stepped back out of the front door. Down the cracked flagstone path. Out through the little gate and through the carpet of flowers - red, pink and white carnations, lilies, gladiolus, purple and white hyacinth, poppies, dark crimson roses, sunflowers, bouquets of every colour Frank could imagine, tiny cards and bears and balloons.

There were people too, standing around, looking up at the ruined house. Come to pay their respects or see for themselves or gawp, whatever it was the crowd parted for them as they made their way through, looking down in astonishment at the noisy basket that carried the cat. Frank had forgotten to ask Lupin what the cat’s name was. At least, he presumed, it would be comfortable with Neville.

Alice took his free hand, and they vanished once more with a crack.

At home, they let the cat out, and it ran immediately up the stairs, no doubt to hide under a bed, so quick that he only just had time to see that it was grey. ‘I think it takes them a while to settle in,’ said Alice. ‘Someone in my dorm had a cat, but we didn’t see it for the first two weeks because it was hiding.

‘Neville will like it,’ he said, banishing the basket up to the attic. ‘He’ll just need to learn not to pull it’s tail.’

Alice gave a heavy sigh. ‘I should go and get him.’

‘My parents said they’d take him overnight,’ he replied, pulling off his jacket. His wand, in the pocket, thunked against the bannister of the stairs as he tossed it over and kicked off his shoes. ‘You know what Mum’s like, furious that she hasn’t been able to see him as much as a grandmother ought, I thought that now things are settling down we’d give her-’

‘I know, I know,’ said Alice, running her hand through her blonde hair. ‘But I’m just wondering if we should go and get him anyway, after being in that house again, I just feel really uneasy-’

Behind them, the door was thrown open with a bang.


End file.
